Chad Silverstein explains why high performers stop comparing themselves to an imagined future. Instead they focus on small wins, accept plateaus and setbacks as normal, and measure progress backward to see how far they've come.
Chapters
Leadership and performance. Being a high performer, it's not linear and never will be. You know, there is a cadence, and all you have to do is look backwards to see this in your life already. But it's never going to be perfect, and it's never just going to be a straight line up to the top. You're going to have those, you know, starts and stops and have to embrace the pain of being in the valley before you can get to the top of the mountain. And the one thing I've learned about high performers is they embrace that journey. They embrace being on a plateau for a while and understand that that's really where the real growth occurs. And all you have to do is think about it. If you've ever hit a goal and you feel really good, that doesn't last very long. It doesn't matter if you're a little kid and you just can't wait until you can become tall enough and join your brothers or your sisters in something. Or I've heard an example before. Like, you know, the kids in the elevator and they can't reach the button, and they always try to reach it. They always try to reach it, and then their parent picks them up. And then the one day where they're tall enough and they can hit it, that's the last time that's ever a big deal. The real win is on the journey. The real win is in embracing the pain to get there. And that's where most people quit. But once you hit your goal, most people who are always hitting their goals know that you just start to throw the rock out even further out, and you start going after the next one. In fact, most people don't hit their goals. They're not good at hitting their goals because as they get closer to their goal, they start raising the bar even higher. And, you know, we call this the gap trap for a reason, meaning, you know, you set a goal and a vision for where you want to go, and it's an ideal. It's not even real. And if you compare where you are to where that is, have fun. This is why we always measure backwards, because we want to see where we came from, and we can see the growth and it motivates us. Whereas if you're going to compare to where you want to be and you're not ever going to get there because you're going to keep throwing the rack out further. It can get really depressing, especially if you throw the rack out far and you're comparing yourself out to the ultimate. And again, this is why New Year's resolutions fail. Someone says they want to lose 20 pounds, all of a sudden a couple weeks in, they fail. They ate some crap, and they're so far away from losing 20 pounds, they just say screw it. Instead of focusing on a small productive action, something really, really small, like doing something once this week or drinking more water or something they can do, and they can kind of get the momentum by winning, getting lots of wins in. That's, that's the way high performers have a consistent way of approaching a nonlinear way of performing farming. You're gonna have your fails, you gotta get back up. And the leaders who can get back up and keep falling and they fail. And they jump from one failure to the next with enthusiasm. They will always win because they're always winning as they're failing. And when you could look back and you realize that the grind is when your real growth occurred, you just couldn't see it when you're in the midst of it. But you talk to any individual who's over the age of 60, who was successful in their life when they were 30, 40 and 50, they will all tell you it was the best time. Even though it was really hard. You know, they loved it. They loved it. I mean, many people who are, who are older will love that. Maybe they're retired or maybe they're taking it easy. And some people are not wired to live that way. But they almost all say that the grind is where it was at. It was when they were building their company. It's when they broke through the ceilings. It's when they had the hardest things happen and they overcame them. Our tests, our challenges, make us who we become. It's where the real wisdom comes from. And so if you're expecting a linear way of moving through your journey towards being successful, whatever it is you do, good luck. And sometimes you got to be realistic. And in this case, being realistic means you're gonna fall flat on your face. And those are the rare opportunities to start embracing instead of getting depressed about and realizing that if you've been stuck on a plateau for a while and you haven't been climbing, know that all of a sudden you're gonna get this burst. And when that burst comes, you're gonna realize why you were sitting on that plateau for so long. The bursts are definitely what we're after, but how you get there is by embracing the pain of not bursting. And that's the non linear part of growth. And for anyone who performs at anything, whether it's sports, academics, their job, a skill you'll just embrace the fact that, you know, it doesn't just keep getting better and better. You're gonna go back, and then you go forward and you're looking for that burst.
